Thunder. Not distant. The kind that comes from directly overhead, low and physical, you feel it in the chest.
She looks at me.
"You're staying," I say. It's not a question; it's the only sensible reading of the situation — gravel road, two-lane highway, visibility about to go to nothing. She knows it too.
"Okay," she says.
Just like that.
We get the hens in. She holds the gate, I move them, Gerald makes her displeasure known through the fence. The hens are sorted in ten minutes. I check the hive covers, weigh them down, and by the time I come back to the porch the first rain has started: fat, slow drops on the dry wood, the smell coming up immediately.
She's standing at the porch rail watching it start.
"This is incredible," she says.
"You've seen rain before."
"Not like this." She's not being dramatic. The light is doing something specific at the edge of the storm, that narrow band of gold that exists for about four minutes before a system rolls in, and the mountains are lit up strange and the valley is going dark below them and she's watching it with the whole of herself the way she watches everything. "In the city, rain is just wet. Here it's like an event."
"Give it five minutes," I say. "It'll be more of an event."
She laughs. The rain picks up. We step back under the roof overhang.
Burl, has not moved from his blanket.
As the storm builds and the rain gets harder. The power goes out at. I light the kitchen lamp and find two more candles from the shelf and set them on the table, and Sloane is leaningin the kitchen doorway watching me like I'm doing something interesting when it's just candles. I've lived without power for whole weeks.
"Do you want tea?" I ask.
“Yes, please.”
She sits at the kitchen table and Fig, who has manifested from wherever she goes during storms jumps up beside her and sits with her back to the room. Sloane strokes her once, two fingers along the spine, not making a fuss about it. Fig allows it.
I make tea on the gas stove.
The rain is loud on the roof, and the thunder comes in waves, and the candle on the table throws everything amber. Sloane has her hands wrapped around the mug before I've finished pouring and she's looking at the flame without thinking about it, and in this light she is nothing short of perfect.
I put the kettle down.
I can’t help but look at her and think of how adorable her quirks are, like the fact that she talks to the animals and doesn't care if I overhear. I've been careful about looking at her in any other way. But God, she’s beautiful. No matter how careful I am, I can’t deny it.
In candlelight, being careful gets harder.
"So tell me how a city boy becomes a homesteader," she says.
I sit down across from her. "What do you want to know?"
"Why you left." She glances up. "You don't have to."
"I know." I pause. "I was good at it," I say. "The job. Fund management. I understood how the systems worked and I was useful in them and for a long time that felt like enough." I watch the candle. "Then it stopped feeling like enough and I didn't know what to do about that, so I kept going. For about three years past when I should have stopped."
"What made you stop?"
"My father died."
She's quiet. Doesn't sayI'm sorrystraight away, which I appreciate. She nods.
"He had this piece of land. He wasn't a farmer. He just liked having land, kept a garden, some fruit trees. I went up after the funeral to sort things out and I stayed two weeks." I turn the mug. "I slept eight hours every night. I didn't check my phone. I ate what was in the garden. And at the end of the two weeks I went back to Vancouver and sat in my office on the thirty-second floor and I thought:I can't do this anymore."
